Exclusion zone
An exclusion zone is a geographical region on Aerb to which a kind of magic (for a loose definition of the term) is restricted. The Exclusionary Principle When an exclusion occurs, some particular magic, magical effect, physical effect, or entad ceases to function in all but a relatively small geographical region. When an exclusion happens, there are typically two immediately visible effects. The first is that magic everywhere stops working, except within the exclusion zone. The second is that exclusion is often accompanied by some calamity within the exclusion zone. Typologies *Silent exclusion: A “silent” exclusion is one in which no one is affected by the loss of magic, usually because it wasn’t in use, and there is no accompanying catastrophe in the exclusion zone. These are typically discovered after the fact, with the “reason” for the exclusion being discovered at a later date, if at all. *Dead exclusion: Enpersoned and entad exclusion zones are not necessarily permanent, especially because exclusion on its own does not provide immortality or indestructibility. Once the person dies or the entad is destroyed, the exclusion zone is “dead”, meaning that the excluded magic no longer exists in the world. Sometimes, the exclusion zone can be reclaimed. *Full exclusion: Occasionally an exclusion will be detected by the loss of magic among its practitioners, but without the apparent creation of an accompanying exclusion zone. To all appearances, the magic is simply gone from the world. (Sometimes the exclusion zone is found at a later date. This was especially the case when telecommunications were not what they are today. Needless to say, if people find the exclusion, it’s no longer a full exclusion.) *Partial exclusion: If the exclusion applies to a specific magical effect or to a school of magic, sometimes the exclusion will be partial, i.e. not affecting the entirety of the school or effect. Specific elements of soul magic have been excluded but the school as a whole is not afflicted. Specific applications of the bulk teleportation spell have been excluded, but the spell is not excluded. It is unclear what causes partial exclusions. *Empersoned exclusion: Sometimes, in addition to the restriction of magical effects to a geographical area, it’s additionally restricted to a single person within that geographical area. As a rule, these people cannot leave the exclusion zone by any means. There are currently thirteen empersoned exclusions. *Entad exclusion: Similar to empersoned exclusions, but an entad is confined to the exclusion zone instead of a person. There are currently six entad exclusions. *Double exclusion: It’s occasionally the case that two exclusions form next to each other with overlapping area, or one forms within the borders of another. This holds no special significance, except insofar as it might complicate attempts at dealing with the exclusions. *Free exclusion: An imperial term. An exclusion is considered ‘free’ if it has arable land and poses no direct threat to the mortal species. Thus far, only two exclusion zones have been deemed ‘free’, the Homostasis exclusion zone and the Parsmont exclusion zone. *Minor exclusion: An imperial term. Minor exclusions are capable of maintaining a small population with little outside support in conditions not much more hostile than a hot desert or arctic expanse. People living in minor exclusions experience and expect hardships, and tend to have lower lifespans, but they are in no imminent danger. *Major exclusion: An imperial term. Without significant magical support or extensive non-magical preparations and planning, lifespan in a major exclusion is measured in hours. Any person living within a major exclusion zone is doing so with either tacit permission of an enpersoned exclusion, or heavy wards and magical support. Causes (and Questions) It is unknown what causes an exclusion zone, but a shorthand for the cause, whatever it might be, is “the exclusionary principle”. There are, however, some common links between the exclusions, which provide a starting point for talking about what rules govern the exclusionary principle. First and foremost, exclusions coincide with zone-encompassing calamities so often that the simplest rule is “whenever something would destroy the world, an exclusion is created instead”. This is clear, intuitive, and wrong, given the number of counterexamples that are available. A more complex version might be “whenever something would fundamentally change the world, an exclusion is created instead”. This accounts for both calamitous exclusions and more benign ones, but leads to the question of what ‘whenever’ might mean. Given the existence of silent and full exclusions, the answer can’t be a simple set time period before the change would occur. Without being able to answer that question, we’re left looking for a unifying exclusionary principle, if one exists. It’s also unclear how exclusion zones themselves are created. Geographical footprints vary wildly, from less than twenty square miles in the case of the Nightsmoke exclusion zone, to eighty-two thousand square miles for the Fel Seed exclusion zone. Geographical boundaries sometimes follow natural features such as rivers and mountains, but sometimes present as regular polygons etched on the surface of Aerb. Further, the exclusion zone is rarely centered on the source of the calamity, instead seeming to select its center at random. There is little rhyme or reason to these differences. Lastly, the question must be raised: where are all the good exclusions? Why are exclusions so universally bad for the mortal species? In particular, the majority of the enpersoned exclusion zones wouldn’t have been calamitous if a different person had been subject to being enpersoned. The only reason that the Doris Finch exclusion zone is looked at with fear and suspicion is that the copies are of Doris Finch. Had it been anyone else, the exclusion zone would be a veritable paradise. At this point the evidence for some kind of selection effect is so overwhelming that there must be an answer. Does enpersoning drive people insane? Or are only the insane selected? Juniper’s Notes: From a worldbuilding perspective, the exclusionary principle exists to justify a whole bunch of zones of adventure. From a DM’s perspective, it exists as a diegetic way to stop OP things from destroying or changing the whole world. It’s also a way to ‘end the world’ without actually ending the world. I did always love ending the world...] Research Bans The imperial bans on Research Deemed Likely to Lead to Exclusion (RDLLE, colloquially, “Riddle”) date back to the early days of the Second Empire, when a number of research bans were issued in the hopes of preventing exclusion zones from forming in populated areas and preventing useful magics from being removed from the world. Numerous provisions were made for when and where Exclusion Risk Activities could be conducted, with sites often selected on the basis of how it would impact the Second Empire’s dissident groups rather than potential loss of life, potential loss of economic activity, or other considerations. In the time of the Empire of Common Cause, the RDLLE Acts place blanket prohibitions on a number of fields of research, and these laws are backed up by the full might of the athenaeums (which naturally stand to lose enormous amounts of power should their disciplines be excluded). Specific acts of engineering are also covered under RDLLE, including a number of large-scale proposed projects whose end results are unknown (or insufficiently known) to those who have proposed them. These research bans are not without detractors. The bans are often criticized as overly broad, politically motivated, and detrimental to progress. To the cynical, the research bans are another of the crude legal tools the athenaeums apply against potential competitors, as a non-excluded breakthrough might make an existing school of magic virtually obsolete. To the optimistic, the research bans represent a dimming of hopes for the future (though this language obviously harkens back to the zeitgeist of the Second Empire). Amaryllis’ Notes: People have tried to weaponize it. Of course they have, why wouldn’t they? All you really need to do is an enormous amount of research until you find something that looks like it has enough worldwide scope to trigger an exclusion. From there, you can build an exclusion bomb. It’s not an entirely stupid thing to do, if you’re a self-interested, amoral twat who’s willing to kill an absolutely enormous number of civilians, create a lasting blight on the world, and, if the exclusionary principle doesn’t hold, doom us all. There are even some indications that people have successfully used exclusion as a weapon. Specifically, the area now known as the Risen Lands might have been the result of someone using such a weapon in an act that might ignite a worldwide war… if anyone knew who was responsible. Yes, Anglecynn stood to benefit from the Kingdom of Francorum losing a large portion of their holdings and getting thrown into economic freefall. Yes, it would have been trivial for a small group of scientists to build a lab in the countryside outside the view of Francorum’s primitive intelligence services. Yes, there’s some evidence that such a lab was built and yes, a portion of Anglecynn’s black budget payroll went to a number of scientists who specialized in the (now excluded) necrotic field effect. After the exclusion, a fireteam that reported to me went into the exclusion zone to look at a small plot of land purchased with funds from one of Anglecynn’s many black budgets and found that it had been burned down. No, no one has seen hair nor hide of the scientists who were on the black budget payroll. If you had all those facts at your disposal, you could construct a narrative that looked very bad for Anglecynn, so bad that economic sanctions would be a given and expulsion from the Empire of Common Cause would be on the table, along with civil unrest and possibly war. Of course, whether or not Anglecynn actually did it would be conjecture, and it wouldn’t help anyone for those facts to be made public, especially since there’s no rogue element within the Lost King’s Court that we could point a convincing finger at as a scapegoat.] Known Exclusion Zones There are at least sixty-three known exclusion zones. As of Montage!, there were fifty-three, conservatively. There are six entad and thirteen empersoned zones. . There were three silent exclusion zones known to Uther of which illusion magic was one. There are at least 218 excluded things, some of which might not be zone-associated. 83 of Juniper's skills relate to exclusions. Juniper has caused one exclusion, which took out all of skin magic. A Brief Description of Aerb indicates that there are thirteen total empersoned exclusion zones: Amaryllis states that there are thirteen Juniper might be able to defeat, which gives the Slayer of Horrors quest (which has 13 subquests, but includes Fel Seed, which Amaryllis excludes). Amaryllis might have been counting Caldwell Gatesmith twice, as he has two exclusion zones. Place known *Blue Fields: Nuclear weapons. Listed as an exclusion zone Juniper couldn't handle. *Boastre Vino, Athenaeum of Speculation and Scrutiny: Illusion magic. *City of a Thousand Brides: Fel Seed sits on his flesh throne in the City of a Thousand Brides. *City of Lasting Blood. *Datura Desert: Thaum-seekers, or the blight that kills plants and animals. Four hundred miles. Contains both Caer Laga and the Barren Jewel , which ward against the thaum-seekers. Listed as an exclusion zone Juniper couldn't handle. *Dimensions: three parallel dimensions and the mirror dimension . The dream dimension is commonly thought to be excluded, but it is not. The disjoint planes may be excluded. *Gates of Leron: Contains the only shortcut to [[the Other Side]. No details about the actual exclusion are known. *Glassy Fields: Glass magic (#112). Contains vidrics. *Lankwon: Manifest only. *Li'o: Skin magic. One hundred mile radius. *Nightsmoke. *Pai Shep: Farming, warrior-farmer only. *Parsmont. Possibly related to the Abswifth or the Tower of Polity. *Pendleham, City of Flesh: Fleshsmithing exclusion. In the Slayer of Horrors quest, so possibly empersoned. *Risen Lands: Necrotic field: the dead rise as shambling corpses. Large territory of the former Kingdom of Francorum. Exclusion zone centered around Silmar City, in a weaponized formation of a exclusion zone. *Wettring: Entad exclusion, Fountain of Everblood. Place unknown *REDACTED: REDACTED gets more powerful the more you know about him. *Caldwell Gatesmith exclusion zone: Portal magic, Caldwell Gatesmith only. Two exclusion zones. *Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle exclusion zone: Zombie magic (partial necromancy), Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle only. Could turn people into zombies under his complete control, but conscious as their bodies slowly decayed. *Doris Finch exclusion zone: Duplication magic, Doris Finch only. *Guardian of the Underworld exclusion zone: AI? One man only. *Finger of the Sun exclusion zone: Something to do with Celestar. In the Slayer of Horrors quest, so possibly empersoned. *Rove exclusion zone: Eating things?, Rove only. *Time Loop exclusion zone: Time loops. One created, ongoing. Young boy only. *Unwavering exclusion zone: Brainwashing?, goblin only. Only exclusion skill known *Butterfly magic. *Carrollism. *Clock magic. *Conjoinery. *Constriction magic (#18). *Dibbling. *Dream-walking. *Ex Nihilo (#216). *Funnel magic. *Gray magic. *Groove casting (#217). *Ice Magic (#16) . Possibly one of the silent exclusion zones known to Uther. *Lycanthropy. *Mentalism. *Psionics. *Skill construction: Gestalting (#4) , Custom skills (#17). *Uniqulomancy. References Category:Locations